


ways to find true north

by Crowned_Ladybug



Category: Half-Life
Genre: Alyx Vance's Ever-Growing Collection of Uncles, During Canon, Gen, Gman only mentioned but i'm gonna fuckin deck him, Gordon and Barney are both trans but it's mostly just mentioned in passing, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mute Gordon Freeman, Post-Canon, Team as Family, Touch-Starved, this is kind of just Let Gordon Hug His Friends Agenda tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-09
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 06:34:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29309637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crowned_Ladybug/pseuds/Crowned_Ladybug
Summary: Gordon needs to get out of here. Knock out this guard once they’re alone, get their weapons, run. Find out where he is, find out where togo, look for his friends,save them. Straightforward to-do lists lining up orderly in his head the moment it becomes clear that he’s lost and trapped and that right there is theenemy.And then the door is shut (there’s blood on the floor, there’sblood) and then the guard is turning to him, reaching up to their mask, and Gordon watches like a cornered animal, ready to lash out if prodded and-Barney.---Gordon wakes up in an unfamiliar city, hell still on his mind, and reunites with some people.
Relationships: Barney Calhoun & Gordon Freeman, Barney Calhoun/Gordon Freeman, Gordon Freeman & Alyx Vance, Gordon Freeman & Everyone
Comments: 9
Kudos: 86





	ways to find true north

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [hands at the sky](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29159028) by [bee_bro](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bee_bro/pseuds/bee_bro). 



> I'm pretty sure if I didn't routinely tell things that could be inconveniencing me (were I not evil and gay and playing with godmode on) that they're being homophobic while playing hl2, my no1 Top Comment directed at this game so far would be I Love My Friends, Let Me Hug Them. This is me letting Gordon hug his friends.
> 
> It's also me carrying on the cycle of Softness and Content and Hopeful Post-Apocalyptic Stories with Dima, previous public installment being [this fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29159028), which absolutely obliterated me.
> 
> (Pacing might be fucked, I'm not sure. I had only a very vague outline for this and then it ran away from me because it was too fun to write, so it kind of just...happens.)

When Gordon gets off the train, he’s surprised he doesn’t just miss the step and collapse. But only mildly surprised. Somewhere, under the haze in his head that’s refusing to clear.

He looks at the world around him and barely sees. All of it is overlaid with the memory of those _eyes_. Cold and bright blue but also _not_ and _so fucking close to his face_ , what the fuck, he never liked eye contact but this is just _excessive_.

The train station feels unfamiliar. Looks? Feels. He’ll settle for feeling. It feels unfamiliar and wrong. Everyone is wearing the same clothes and he can’t read the writing on the walls, maybe?

There’s screens hung from the walls, clashing with everything else, cracks running down the plaster where they’re bolted on, and someone on them is talking. Breen. Breen? No, that can’t be Breen. Or maybe it can. Gordon could swear he wasn’t always this grey and ugly. Oh, well. He’s probably wrong about, uhh, something. He’s already not listening. Was he ever?

Those eyes. Those fucking eyes. Cold and inhuman and smug.

And who even wears a tie like that?

He’s disoriented and the world is hazy as he makes his way through the train station. He’s waved this way and that, and he numbly listens. People try to talk to him, and sometimes he notices their mouths moving. Doesn’t process much though.

After a while of staring at walls as he passes he realises that some of the half-peeled posters are in Russian.

Huh.

He used to take Russian classes while at college, to give his brain something to do that wasn’t numbers. Let it switch gears a little bit. He’s rusty now, haven’t had the chance to use the language much since he started working at Black Mesa, but he can still read. It’s nice.

He wishes the letters would stop staring at him like that though.

Not all the posters are in Russian. He finds that mildly interesting. He thinks one of them must be Bulgarian, maybe, because he can’t read it but almost can. Another he recognises as Romanian. That one always made him think of very Slavic-looking Latin.

And...which language puts so many dots over vowels again? Little double lines and dots above the “o”s and the “u”s.

Eh. He’ll figure it out later, maybe. A nice mystery to mull over wherever he’s going.

Is he going somewhere?

He’s wearing the same clothes as everyone else, and he doesn’t like that. Not because he’s one to really want to stand out from the crowd, but, well. It’s a little boring. They didn’t even let him pick a funny tie. Or _anything_ , for that matter.

He’s still thinking about those eyes, staring at him from so, so close, as he’s herded into some sorting area between chainlink fences. He assumes the other side is where he’s going.

Instead a door opens in a wall, and he’s told to follow the...whoever these people are, in the uniforms.

Gordon has never much liked this kind of uniform-wearing people. Cops and fucking military and whatnot. Not even the Black Mesa security guards at first glance. His fondness for them was always individual, and earned, not given freely.

But these people, whatever their official job description might be, are wearing uniforms nothing like he’s used to. Are those fucking _gas masks_?

As he moves, it feels like the world has slowed, but he knows better than to disobey. He doesn’t feel like it’d do him much good if he disobeyed.

He thinks about bulletproof vests and blue shirts, the _familiar_ kinda uniforms, and big stupid helmets he always used to laugh about with Barney and-

The sense of haze and confusion and something’s wrong, _something’s wrong_ coils and bursts in his mind and – Black Mesa. The Resonance Cascade. The HEV suit, the corpses, the aliens, the blood. Kleiner and Eli and little Alyx and _Barney_ …

What the hell is Gordon doing here? _What happened to them?_

The cold eyes, the afterimage burned into the back of his own, seem to laugh at him.

He follows this unfamiliar guard – grey colours, thick armour, _gas mask_ – as he’s ordered. Swallows down the dread rising in his throat for just another moment. He’s already calculating.

He needs to get out of here. Knock out this guard once they’re alone, get their weapons, run. Find out where he is, find out where to _go_ , look for his friends, _save them_. Straightforward to-do lists lining up orderly in his head the moment it becomes clear that he’s lost and trapped and that right there is the _enemy_.

And then the door is shut (there’s blood on the floor, there’s _blood_ ) and then the guard is turning to him, reaching up to their mask, and Gordon watches like a cornered animal, ready to lash out if prodded and-

 _Barney_.

He’s talking, and Gordon can barely hear him. It’s him. It’s him. He’s alive, he’s alive, _he’s alive_. It runs on a loop in his head until he can almost believe it. It’s the same voice he’s used to, the same tone, those same warm eyes he’s seen his own laughter reflected in hundreds of times, getting taunted into challenges, hiding out in broom closets to look at comic books Barney had smuggled onto his shift, those same eyes. He ignores what feels off (the grey flecks in his hair, the wrinkles that make him look older than he should be, and _what_ is that armour anyway) in favour of the familiarity. The comfort.

He’s been through hell since the Resonance Cascade, but knowing that Barney made it out just like he did, and giving him that vain hope that maybe _others_ did too, it eases some of that pain, a little bit.

For the first time since he got off that train, he can stop thinking about blue eyes staring into his. He concentrates on brown instead.

Barney is talking about needing to get out of here fast, and Gordon’s logic and instinct all agree. This is dangerous, whatever _this_ is. He needs to get out of here. Take Barney with him this time if he can, he’s had so many regrets as he picked his way through Black Mesa, about not finding him or anyone else, about not stopping or going back every turn. He’s not leaving him behind again.

Logic and instinct and Barney all say _get out_. Heart says something else.

Barney stops abruptly mid-sentence when Gordon hugs him.

The way Barney’s arms come up around him immediately feels so comfortingly familiar that Gordon almost cries. Maybe he would if the rest of him wasn’t still screaming in alarm. He’d been stuck in that fucking suit for so long, and even if he weren’t, it’s not like whatever had gone down in Black Mesa had warranted _cuddling_. He missed this. He needed this.

He also needs to get the fuck out and not die.

“I’m sorry, Doc, but-”

But before Barney could even finish, Gordon’s already pulling back. Mind running a mile a minute. He takes a deep breath and nods. Break over, world can keep on going.

Barney’s hands linger on his side for a moment longer before he steps back.

(The pain in his eyes is palpable.)

“I, alright, yeah. I’ll get Kleiner on the line for you,” he turns away and starts typing on some panel of the whatever the hell it is that’s pushed against the wall there. It’s got screens and keyboards, so Gordon decides to call it a computer. If it has any complaints about that, he’s not listening. “But there’s not much time, you gotta get outta here. We’re taking way too many risks as is.”

Gordon’s mind catches up a moment too late like it’s waiting for the screen to light up, but when it does-

Kleiner is okay. Kleiner made it out too.

He grins despite himself and waves at his old mentor. He seems ecstatic, and under some weariness that Gordon cannot put his finger on, so does Barney, and for a moment that’s enough. He lets it be enough.

And then the screen goes dark again, and he’s left with a sickening mix of anxiety and relief and the mention of _Alyx_ burning into the back of his mind, and he needs to _go_. He needs to go, get out of here, not endanger Barney in whatever it is that he’s doing here.

One last thing, before he goes.

He yanks Barney into another quick hug in the threshold of the backroom he’s ushered him into. Squeezes him as tight as he can and feels him squeeze back and _hopes_ that it’ll convey his thank-you well enough, when hugging takes precedent over signing.

“Gordon, you gotta _go_ ,” his words are muffled against Gordon’s shoulder and Gordon wants to cry, a little bit. “I’ll see you later. _Promise_.”

Gordon nods and lets go. Taps three times against Barney’s shoulder as he does and hopes to god that he knows the meaning of it. And then he runs.

He only looks back once he’s climbed the ladder, and by then, the door has long been shut.

  
  


Gordon gets ambushed. Ugly habit that one is building up to be.

He also gets his ass saved right after, which, on the other hand, is not something he’s used to. Well, maybe from the wrath of his coworkers when he didn’t even _do_ anything, or petty menial work assigned to him by superiors who think his PhD is just decoration. But not from serious physical harm done by armed cops.

Are these cops?

Gordon decides to call them cops because he doesn’t like them.

He shortly learns that, apparently, they’re called _Combine_. That only brings to mind combine _harvesters_ , which is an unfortunate association, but he manages to keep from laughing, if only for the fact that he almost just got dragged off by pseudo-military again.

And then he learns the name of his saviour also, and things go to shit. A little bit. Mostly localised to his own head which at the very least only boasts a population of _one_.

Of _course_ he remembers Eli. While Gordon had been much closer with Kleiner, for many obvious reasons, Eli had always been a friendly face. And yes, the Eli he remembers _did_ have a daughter named Alyx.

Alyx Vance, a proud four-and-a-half years old and currently going through a maybe-phase where she finds every bug to be just as fascinating as Gordon does. Most definitely _not_ allegedly-Alyx-Vance, a seemingly grown woman who packs enough punch to take down four armed Tracto- C _ombine_ on her own and have not even a scratch to show for it.

“Thank you,” Gordon signs, because he can’t really think of anything else to.

Alyx (?) lights up at that, and Gordon knows that the Alyx _he_ knows knows a few signs, so that checks out in some fucked up way, and she grins, and it looks so much like Eli’s grins, even if sharper, wilder, that immediately all doubt leaves Gordon’s mind.

He now knows two things. One: this woman who had just saved his ass is, _somehow_ , who she claims she is.

And Two:

Something is really, _really_ fucking wrong.

  
  


Alyx runs ahead, does a cool jump over a railing that Gordon is too tired to mimic (but he could, okay, he _could_ , because he’s cool like that and the last time he’d tried that without the HEV suit it had been _Barney_ who had twisted an ankle, _not him_ ) and then seems to realise that Gordon can’t exactly shout for her to wait up. She waits as Gordon walks down the stairs like a normal person.

Good, because Gordon feels like they’ve got some talking they should be doing.

His first thought is to say that she cannot in fact be Alyx Vance, but he vetoes that thought as soon as it comes. If someone ran up to him and promptly informed him that he isn’t Gordon Freeman, he wouldn’t take to that kindly either. He picked this name out himself (well, the _Gordon_ part anyway), thank you very much, he’s not handing it over to anyone just because they said so.

(Barney had once told him that his name fits his nerd image perfectly and all he needs to complete it now is a sweater vest. In return Gordon told him that _his_ name makes him sound like a cowpoke.

That eventually devolved into both of them listing off all the names they _almost_ named themselves. Some of them Gordon is still not over.

He can picture Barney as a lot of things, but he draws the line at fucking _Matthew_.)

Directly doubting Alyx’s word is out of the question, so…

“How long has it been?” Gordon asks, and then his hands hover for a moment. _Resonance Cascade_ is a damn annoying phrase to fingerspell. “Since Black Mesa?”

There, that should do. He figures that whatever had gone down back there, the company probably didn’t survive it. Or _shouldn’t_ have. People had made way too many jokes about one day bringing about the end of the world somewhere in the 9-to-5 to be sure.

Alyx gives him a long look and that, just like everything else Gordon has seen so far (maybe except for Barney), spells _trouble_.

“Uhm, 20 years, give or take? Why?”

Gordon needs to sit down. He doesn’t.

The urge to tell her she’s wrong again is there and once again stubbornly _not listened to_. It’s only worse that in some fucked up way, it makes sense. This Alyx _could_ easily be 24, and-

No. Stop. Gordon absolutely refuses to think any farther than that. Actually, Gordon refuses to think at _all_. He can put all of this in a nice little box for now and do some thinking later, when he’s not out and about and unarmed somewhere where cops just tried to kill him like ten minutes ago and before then he had to be smuggled out of a train station by his best friend _who was dressed as one of those cops_ -

No thinking. Absolutely zero thinking.

Time for this later.

“Let’s go,” he signs courtly to Alyx, who now probably thinks he’s very rude. But at least she listens and keeps leading the way. Picks the chatting back up soon enough too, which Gordon finds he doesn’t mind at all.

  
  


Gordon hardly has time to note that Kleiner’s apparent lab looks like a lab squeezed into a place meant for _anything_ else (is that a _carpet_?) before he zeroes in on Kleiner himself and the interior décor hardly matters anymore. Seeing his mentor on a computer screen and hearing Alyx talk about him with complete certainty in him being alive and real is one thing.

It’s a whole other one to see him in person again.

Even if he’s currently crouched in front of a dog crate and sticking his head inside and yelling for...Lamarr? Alyx doesn’t seem to be phased much by the display nor the name as she walks over, leaving Gordon to stand around awkwardly on his own.

“Everything alright, Dr. Kleiner?” Alyx asks, knocking on the top of the dog crate, making Kleiner shoot up and bang his head against the ceiling of it. Alyx’s expression is more amusement than concern, so Gordon takes that to mean that this isn’t a rare occurrence.

Kleiner straightens up, properly this time, rubbing the top of his head. “Well, almost alright, only that-”

He finally notices Gordon, words trailing off and eyes widening, and Alyx hides her laughter behind her hands.

“My goodness, Gordon, it really is you!”

Gordon barely hears Alyx’s fond “I mean, who did you _think_ -”, too focused on his old-mentor-turned-friend, still in one piece in some hodgepodge underground lab when Gordon had spent so many hours worrying for him as he’d picked his way through Black Mesa. He never found any familiar faces beyond passing acquaintances, and he never knew whether to take it as a good sign or a bad one.

But Kleiner is, evidently, _alive_ , as he stops in front of Gordon, hesitating a moment long enough that Gordon crosses the final step to pull him into a hug himself. Kleiner has never been well-built, so to say, more sinew and bone than padding, but his occasional hugs have always been the closest thing Gordon has ever known to _fatherly_.

When they pull back, Kleiner looks him up and down with an expression not unlike when Gordon had gone to work in a pyjama shirt, shuffling into the lab with a giggling Barney at his heels. Maybe less amused this time, but still so infinitely _fond_.

“I know you’ve just arrived, but it’s so good to have you back.”

And for a moment, the terror of running across rooftops and barebones flats while being shot at, and whatever the fuck has happened to this world while he was apparently maybe _gone_ , feels a little less pressing. “Good to be back.”

“I found him wandering around outside,” Alyx chimes in, grinning, and Gordon feels like the phrasing is a bit of an understatement. Wandering into batons to the head, maybe. “Bit of a troublemaker, isn’t he?”

Kleiner opens his mouth to say something, but Gordon beats him by signing. “I didn’t _make_ anything, I just walked into it.”

Alyx laughs, apparently very pleased with that response. “Alright, we’re keeping him, right?”

Gordon is still getting used to Alyx being an adult now, probably will be for a long while still, but he’s already decided that he likes her. Not like he didn’t like kid Alyx too, but kid Alyx had been, well, a _kid_. This Alyx is allegedly an adult and feels like she would’ve helped Gordon and Barney rewire Breen’s precious coffee machine to produce only _noises_ , back in their day.

“I don’t know, Alyx, we should probably ask your father,” Kleiner says, tone mock-serious as he walks over to a desk piled high with equipment and papers. He never could stay away from poking his research for too long. “You shouldn’t just go around picking up stray scientists from the streets.”

“I’m vaccinated,” Gordon adds helpfully.

Kleiner needs to translate, Alyx apparently having misinterpreted the sign, but when he does it’s what breaks her into full laughter, and in turn Gordon too.

“Well, you three sure seem to be having a good time.”

“For good reason!” Alyx calls back, and she probably means things much greater than just the joke, but Gordon doesn’t care to analyse it, not now, as he whips around to find Barney stepping closer to them, that horrible gas mask of his luckily gone. The way he smiles feels too subdued for what Gordon is used to from him, but it’s good enough, because it’s still him. Still his Barney.

Gordon crashes into him in a hug that could knock over lesser men. It’s just that kinda day, apparently.

Barney laughs into his shoulder, quiet and tired, and Gordon only squeezes him tighter. “It’s good to see you made it in one piece, Doc.”

From somewhere behind him, Gordon hears Kleiner telling Alyx to give them a moment, and he appreciates it as much as he can concentrate on doing so. He’d long lost count of how many days he’d spent picking his way through the wreckage of Black Mesa, but it has to have been at least a week. At least a week of non-stop horrors and death, stuck in armour that kept him alive but made him feel detached from the world in return. At least a week since he’s seen his best friend, at least a week of worrying for him in the middle of a catastrophe, when normally a few days of missed work already saw them clingy enough that Kleiner would gently poke fun at them for it.

He knows he’s absolutely ruining his already smudged glasses by shoving his head against Barney’s, but it hardly matters. He’s here, he’s _okay_ , and Gordon is not going to leave him behind again. He’s never leaving him behind again.

He absently taps out three against his shoulder again (he barely ever used to do this with anyone, but an alien apocalypse changes a man), and Barney laughs some wet little laugh against his shoulder.

“You can’t make me cry, Doc, it’s unfair.”

They’ll be a moment. It’s fine.

  
  


There’s a teleporter. And an HEV suit. And a headcrab included with the HEV suit.

That last one is less than ideal.

Gordon doesn’t want to say anything mean about Lamarr, because he knows how much it had hurt him whenever people would react to his bugs by saying that they want to kill them. And Kleiner has always been his ally when it came to not killing bugs that have wandered into the labs.

But he _really_ doesn’t have fond memories about headcrabs. He’s with Barney on this one.

Lamarr sits on top of some lockers, and Kleiner talks to her like she’s a weird cat, and Barney is very visibly upset but nonetheless not backing away even just out of headcrab jumping range. Which might seem stupid, but Gordon knows him, and _yes,_ Barney is sometimes prone to doing stupid things, _that’s not the point-_

Point is that even in Black Mesa his strategy for dealing with particularly intimidating bugs had been to freeze and stare at them real hard in hopes of impressing Gordon, so this is maybe only half new. The headcrab is the new part.

Gordon’s instincts are screaming to _protect_ , and since he cannot do that without getting rid of Lamarr in rude ways, the next best thing is to _comfort_. Kleiner tries and fails to control his pet as Gordon places himself shoulder to shoulder with Barney, and they watch together as Lamarr eventually disappears into a vent.

“Sorry, Doc. Still don’t much like these guys,” Barney says once Lamarr is most definitely gone, stepping away like nothing happened. Always the tough guy (except when Gordon buys him lunch and then he forgets how to talk for a bit. Even though it was always just shitty Black Mesa sandwiches, so Gordon never quite understood what the big deal was).

“You’re fine. I don’t like them either,” he’s careful to sign that turned away from Kleiner, who’s already busy with something else. Something about the HEV suit and teleporters, he should probably be listening but he isn’t. He’s gotta take problems one at a time. “What do you call these guys anyway?”

Barney gives him a weird look that only lasts a moment. “Headcrabs, mostly.”

He signs along with the word and Gordon is delighted by how similar it is to the sign he’d made up for them back in Black Mesa. It’s not like he had anyone to talk to about them, but it filled his downtime with something other than fearing for his life. Great minds think alike, or something.

  
  


This HEV suit is much more optimised than the previous one Gordon had known, so it’d probably take less time to put on too. Emphasis on _would_ , if he were being assisted by maybe one expert like last time, instead of two experts and a Barney, and all three of them very enthusiastic to be helping.

Gordon also really, _really_ fucking doesn’t want to be put into an HEV suit again.

He knows not to outright _say_ that or complain in any way, of course. This suit, for whatever reason, was _made for him_ and it’s been waiting for him here for- no, not 20 years, but who knows for how long. For him. For some reason. High-tech armour hidden away in a little lab in a world where masked cops tear apart civilian flats for fun. Waiting for him. A theoretical physicist who used to always argue with people who killed bugs instead of letting him take them outside and who only learned how to shoot a gun because the other option had been to die trying.

Hell, he was never even the athletic type. Still isn’t. They’d always laugh about how Barney could pick him up, and his ribs had always shown a little. Racing down corridors and through vents only grants one with so much physical exercise. He seldom sought out any beyond that on his own.

(The Black Mesa Swimming Pools don’t count. Most of what he’d done in there had been getting tossed around and ignoring the signs calling for Appropriate Adult Behaviour in favour of shoving Barney underwater for making fun of his molecule-patterned swimming trunks.)

Being in the HEV suit means gunfire and violence and so many horrible things he never wishes to see or hear ever again.

It’s also, apparently, his job now.

Kleiner goes on and on about how this new HEV suit was built for him specifically, with more comfort and functions and better armour and- and then Alyx chimes in with something else to add, so that puts another thing on the list of things Gordon knows he should remember but has no capacity for anymore. They are right though, this feels more comfortable than what he remembers. Some of the joints still press uncomfortably in on already bruised and raw spots on his skin, but it’s overall an improvement.

“Kleiner said the old ones were really bulky,” Alyx says as she helps him adjust his gloves. “These should be easier to sign in. Amongst other things, I guess.”

And she’s right, they do feel better. Lighter, he hopes not at the cost of armour. The old gloves had worn on his hands, and even if in the cavalcade of today even he _himself_ seems to have forgotten, putting a glove back on reminds him instantly. It aches and it stings and he immediately wishes he could take it back off.

But he can’t, so he doesn’t tell his friends about any of this.

“Shame about the ponytail, though,” Barney says from behind him, in a tone that’s so blatantly obviously meant to _distract_ , so okay, maybe he wasn’t as good at hiding his distress as he’d hoped. No matter. “I’m gonna miss it.”

The actual content of those words takes a moment to settle in, but when it does, Gordon’s now gloved hand is flying to the back of his head and-

Sure enough, his hair is cut short and his ponytail is gone. He looks around in alarm like he could somehow _find it_ , as shocked by this discovery as he is by not having noticed it sooner, as Barney bursts out laughing behind him. Alyx eyes them both eagerly like she’s waiting for a story.

“Nice to know I won’t be alone then, I guess,” Barney adds, his laughter that’s already too quiet and stiff to really be _his_ dying out way too easily.

Gordon twists around to look at him, and Alyx doesn’t even complain at being hindered in her work. He frowns for a bit to make it clear that he doesn’t appreciate the current situation in the slightest, before switching gears.

“At least your hair looks nice.”

And yep, that does it, because now it’s Gordon who’s grinning and Alyx doubled over laughing while Barney seems to lose his entire vocabulary for a moment and then gestures vaguely in Gordon’s general direction, telling him to knock it the fuck off.

(Gordon does mean it though. The grey hairs are a painful reminder of whatever fucked up time travel he’s been apparently subjected to, but they _do_ look good on him. Makes him look distinguished, which is kind of funny for a guy who only learned how to tie a tie _after_ getting hired for a job that has that on the uniform.)

“How do you _lose_ an entire ponytail anyway?” Alyx chimes in, asking the important questions, and Gordon answers by making a universal flailing gesture of _I don’t fucking know_.

“It was there last I checked, and now it’s not!”

Barney steps around to get a proper view of Gordon’s shocked, sweeping signs while Alyx tries to wrangle him to be still just long enough for her to attach another armpiece. Kleiner had exited the scene a while ago, either content with the work already going on or not wanting to be smacked in Gordon’s ranting, no one knows.

“Come on, Doc, I’m sure there’s _some_ sort of physics principle that can explain-”

“If you say Schroedinger’s Ponytail I swear to god-”

Alyx is now officially lost if Gordon had to guess, because him and Barney have a homemade sign specifically for Schroedinger’s cat, because of how many times they’d argued about it. Jokingly and fondly and with Barney being difficult on purpose just so that he can cheer up Gordon on a bad day, but arguments nonetheless.

“Are you three quite done yet?” Kleiner asks from somewhere in the main lab instead of the small room the HEV suit had been in, despite certainly already knowing the answer.

“Not really, but Gordon’s about to hold a lecture on-”

He bites off the rest of that sentence when Gordon surges forward to jab him in the side in retaliation. At least when he leans back, momentarily content with having bullied his best friend enough, it gives Alyx time to manhandle him into letting her continue putting on the suit again.

  
  


Teleporter and HEV suit and also the instructions for charging said HEV suit that Gordon should _really_ be committing to memory all lie forgotten for a moment when Eli shows up in the video call. He’s so much greyer than before and he’s got so many little crinkles at the corner of his eyes when he smiles (and he smiles a _lot_ ), and the only one happier to see him than Gordon is Alyx.

Gordon had not worked with Eli as closely back in Black Mesa as he’d done with Kleiner, but they’d still worked together plenty. Enough for Gordon to have met Alyx back then, and for Eli to make jabs at him for never knowing how to operate the coffee machine to produce something suitable for human consumption. _Definitely_ enough for Gordon to be happy to see him again.

He waves at the screen, and Eli greets him in turn, and the way he smiles down at him feels familiar. His friendliness, his confidence in his work all do. It’s like when Gordon had been nothing but a new hire at Black Mesa, interacting with no one but Kleiner, really, and Eli had just taken his presence in stride.

The teleporter is really cool. Revolutionary, too, probably.

It’s also not plugged in.

“Your PhD is really showing in that one, Doc,” Barney jabs from the control panel, like it’s at all _Gordon’s_ fault that the damn thing wasn’t plugged in. He’s just _being helpful_. Barney won a bet against him _once_ , fixing some lab equipment no one could figure out how to by simply discovering that it wasn’t plugged in, and he hasn’t let it go ever since.

(He also used the money he won to buy himself and Gordon dinner, so Gordon can’t exactly be mad.)

Alyx teleports to Black Mesa East successfully, and Gordon is as excited for the scientific part as he is for the fact that this time, getting from point A to point B won’t include a shitton of violence and suffering and _guns_ -

Of course he jinxes it.

He hates the thought of leaving when Kleiner and Barney aren’t coming with him, and maybe that’s what does it. That despite Alyx and Eli waiting for him on the other side, he _really_ doesn’t want to go. He wants to stay longer, rest his head on Barney’s shoulder until he has to get back to his shift like the good old days, maybe ask Kleiner why the fuck he has a carpet in his lab.

He knows that what _really_ does it is Lamarr leaping into the teleporter with him, but it matters little anyway.

Places change around him so fast he can barely keep up – a beach, Eli’s lab, an _office_ – and then he’s back in Kleiner’s lab once more, and everyone is yelling, and he feels sick and jittery and wants _out_.

“I’m getting him outta there!” Barney shouts even as Kleiner tells him to not, and Gordon reaches out immediately, but he can’t even fit his hand through the rings of the teleporter. He wants out, he wants _out_ , he wants to stay, _don’t leave me again, don’t leave me, don’t leave me_ -

More flashing, he’s underwater, he’s drowning, where’s Barney, where’s Kleiner, Eli, Alyx-

And then his feet are on solid ground again, though he himself feels less so. He almost collapses against the wall as he finally heaves a breath.

  
  


Gordon catches the crowbar thrown at him, and he wants to cry. Not in a good way.

He’s not happy to see this thing again, no matter how many times it’s saved his hide, because holding it again means bad things. It means fighting his way over to Black Mesa East tooth and nail and on foot. It means having to use it to destroy and draw blood again. It means...it means a lot of things, and none of them are good.

“I can’t go with you, I’m sorry, I gotta make sure that Kleiner stays safe,” Barney says, standing above him still, and it makes sense, but Gordon’s heart still aches.

Instead of signing, he reaches a hand up, and Barney reaches down and grabs it for a moment. Gordon squeezes once, even though he can barely feel Barney’s hand against his own through the thick gloves. The raw parts of his fingers protest at that, but tough luck, Gordon’s too used to hurting to care anymore.

He wants to pull Barney with him. Keep his promise of not leaving him behind again. And he so selfishly doesn’t want to be alone this time.

But he knows that that’s exactly what that desire is – selfish. Kleiner needs someone who’s capable with a gun here to protect him, just in case. Barney probably needs to get back to his shift at some point too, he’s probably _already_ staying away too late.

And wherever Gordon is going now, it’s not safe. He could never expose Barney, or anyone else, to more danger than they’re already in just because he wants company.

So he lets Barney’s hand slip from his again, and tries to return his pained, barely-there smile, knowing he’s not doing much better himself. But Barney had kept this damn crowbar safe for him for 20 years. Gordon will make sure he doesn’t have to wait so long this time.

“Stay safe,” Barney says as he steps back from the railing, and Gordon nods, even though they both know that he can’t promise that. He doesn’t ask Barney to promise the same, either.

  
  


The weight of the crowbar in his hand feels familiar. As do the heavy steps of the HEV suit. As did Barney’s warm eyes and Kleiner’s fatherly hugs and Alyx’s smiles that she inherited from her father.

As Gordon takes the first swing at a boarded-up gate, first of many on his upcoming journey, he lets them be his anchor. Lets them ground him as best they can in a world that feels so strange and different and _wrong_. He’s been gone a while, twenty years in fact, through some impossible thing, and even if the number is hard to believe, it shows. It shows, and the number is a lot less important than the fact that he’s kept people waiting for too long. It shows in Barney’s grey hairs and Kleiner and Eli’s new wrinkles and the fact that Alyx has grown up while he wasn’t there to watch.

He can only hope that when all is said and done, he’ll get to stay for long enough to get used to how much the world has changed without him.

  
  


“Gordon? Gordon!”

Gordon startles awake, eyes snapping open before he processes that he’s closed them at all. He twists to push himself up, and his body goes almost _too_ willingly, and then he loses his balance – _where_ was he lying in the first place, he can’t remember what hiding spot he’d fallen asleep in this time, some hidden nook with the illusion of safety from zombies and the Combine – and the floor rushes up to meet him.

His glasses clatter on the ground and he reaches for them blindly, he can’t afford to have his vision compromised for even a second, and if his glasses broke for good he’d be so vulnerable-

His glasses are being pressed back into his bare, scarred hands with a fond hum, just this side of laughter, and the world grinds to a halt.

“Would it kill you to sleep in an _actual_ bed? Just once?” Alyx asks, grinning from where she’s crouched above him.

Gordon huffs in place of an answer and pushes himself to sit up. His shoulder protests, whether from being slept on wrong or because he fell on it just now, he’s not sure. He appreciates the beat-up couch in Alyx’s workshop as much as the next person, but it is far from friendly to his joints when he passes out on it.

Because – oh, yeah. Right. He’s in Alyx’s workshop. Probably fell asleep here sometime after Alyx had bullied him into taking a break from helping her tinker with an upgrade to the gravity gun, at around 3 a.m. or so. The couch is far from comfortable, but it gets a lot of use as a sleeping spot anyway, and everyone goes around bullying everyone else about using it as such before passing out on it themselves, mostly.

They’re slowly coming up on a whole year without the Combine, but Gordon is yet to shed his instincts to reach for a weapon if he’s startled awake. He knows he’s not alone in that.

“Maybe tell Barney that,” he signs belatedly once he’s on his feet. If he’s getting called out for his aversion to sleeping in an actual bed, he might as well drag _someone_ down with him.

“You two are equally bad, you deserve each other.”

She says that grinning and _exactly_ because she knows it gets Gordon flustered and flailing at her to _stop it_ , but there’s _so much_ fondness under it. Gordon knows she means it, even if she weaponises it frequently.

“Anyway, the saplings finally arrived,” she lets him go with some semblance of mercy after taking a moment to enjoy her power over him. “I thought you might wanna be there for it when we get to planting them.”

Gordon takes his jacket from a very polite Dog offering it to him from over the back of the couch and grins. Alyx is putting it real politely that him and Eli haven’t shut up about the humble beginnings of their orchard for about a week now.

As soon as his arms are through the sleeves of his jacket (dyes are hard to come by nowadays, but the Xen flora helps, and one of the resistance members has sewn pride patches onto his shoulder, and he’s been wearing this jacket every day the weather permitted since), he wraps one around Alyx’s shoulders and squeezes her into his side. No signing needed to start the two of them out of the workshop and in the direction of the generously named Gardens outside. They’re generously named both because, it being early spring and all, they don’t boast much vegetation right now, and because they’re _much_ larger than any garden Gordon has ever seen.

Only a few steps in, Alyx starts leaning hard into him to make him stumble and carry both their weight, all while looking as innocent as it gets. Gordon lets her go and sidesteps in one practised motion, and Alyx almost eats shit.

“You are my _worst_ uncle yet,” she informs him as she catches up again and they fall into step together. The noises of Dog trotting behind them never cease.

“Your fault for letting me marry into the family,” Gordon shoots back immediately.

Big mistake.

“Oh, so there’s talk about _marriage_ now?”

If Gordon is the worst uncle then Alyx is the worst niece, and he’s only got the one. Little shit, knows what she’s doing too, and Gordon loves her so much – _not the point_ – and he knows they both know he didn’t mean it _like that_ , hell, he only got a boyfriend a few months ago and he’s still not used to this being real and safe to do, but there is no point in trying to explain that away. Alyx would only make it worse and maybe give Gordon a heart attack in the process.

So instead he just scrambles to reach over and yank her headband down over her eyes. Good enough of a distraction.

When he gets called the worst again, he just laughs. He’s got 20 years of that to catch up on, and he’s working hard on it.

  
  


Gordon finds his familiarity in a strange and new future in _this_.

In Barney’s laugh that’s slowly, slowly returning to how it used to be, loud and unapologetic and contagious, as he watches Alyx rip open a bag of soil over her own lap and somehow still come out shocked at getting covered in it. In Alyx’s scarred, perpetually dirty hands as they press down the ground around the freshly planted saplings, but also as they dig around in boxes of bolts and wires, covered in engine grease. In the old rituals of helping Kleiner find whatever he’s misplaced in the lab, even if it’s just his glasses perched on the top of his head. In the way Eli pats him on the shoulder after a job well done, beaming with pride through the tiredness as they look out over the rows of mud and bare twigs that will one day become an orchard.

(In everyone poking fun at him for having what, to the naked eye, may look like a _mullet_ , when in reality it’s a _new ponytail in progress_.)

He finds his familiarity in mornings not just on a couch or in a hidden corner but in a _bed_ , the ceiling painted so that when blinking awake, both him and Barney immediately know that they’re _home_ , safe. In communal meals with his family and many, many no-longer-strangers, cooking from familiar vegetables and alien meat that doesn’t taste as bad as it sounds. In science papers and alien bugs in a jar and the ambient noise of whirring machinery instead of gunfire.

Somewhere, after a twenty-year break, Gordon Freeman finds himself a home.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> This was supposed to be a short fic and also actually had A Theme when I started writing it, and then a few days later I looked at the word count and it was not a short fic.
> 
> Also, yes, the language Gordon doesn't recognise in the moment is Hungarian! Yes, I'm aware that there is no Hungarian text in any of the HL games, only the City 17 railway station having Hungarian inspiration. But consider this: this is my writing and I get to choose the insignificant, self-indulgent little details I include in it >:)
> 
> [my main tumblr](pristine-starlight.tumblr.com/) | [my art tumblr](crowned-ladybug.tumblr.com/)


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